Escapement (31 page)

He stood, nodding to her. “You have proven to amaze, Mask Childress. May you have a long life and good fortune, with double happiness along the road.”

It sounded suspiciously like a farewell, so much so that when he left the wardroom, she stiffened, expecting the political officer with his pistol to enter in Leung’s place. Naught came save her own fear and the hard racing of her heart. After a time, Childress removed herself to her cabin to worry whether she had practiced wisdom or committed arrant foolishness this day.

If nothing else, she had traded one difficult lie for another, far more comfortable one. And Leung was now her ally. As much as any man, Chinese or otherwise, could be.

She wondered if his stature as a man somehow canceled the meaning of his being Chinese. Childress had known few enough New Englanders with Leung’s grace and courtesy and thoughtful bearing.

Choi presented himself the next morning as she ate cold fish cut together with strips of some pale, fleshy pepper over congealed rice—it was her least favorite of the breakfast preparations. He displayed the hand signal of the white bird once more, then stood close.

“Ni zao?”
she said, straining to greet him politely in such little Chinese as she’d managed to learn. There were at least two forms spoken here on the ship, much as an English ship might sail with officers of the Queen but men who spoke Greek or Turkish or French or some other subject tongue.

“Hello.” His smile was brown-toothed and gapped. Something in it made her sad a moment. Had no one ever cared for this man?

She smiled faintly back and tucked in to the fish with reluctance.

“You declare yourself,” Choi added.

This is the hour of truth,
she thought.
He is come to brace me in my treachery.

She resolved that Mask or no Mask, she would be Childress, and true to herself.
Help me now, Lord, as you have perhaps never helped me before.
“I am who I am,” she said in English, then flushed at the sheer presumption of the statement.

He cocked his head like a bird examining a cart-flattened cat. “Same Mask, not same woman?”

“I am a white bird, of the Feathered Masks.” True enough, taken on its own terms.

“You birds fly far, ah.” Choi nodded. “Where Poinsard?” He pronounced the name oddly,
Pu-yin-sar,
but she took his meaning.

“I stand in her stead, carrying the banner of the
avebianco.
” Childress thought to try flattery. “You of all people should understand that.”

The smile stayed fixed upon his face, seeming more and more the leer of an idiot. “Poinsard she come to bring something. Bird business. Make lucky flight.”

“What she brought was me, Mr. Choi. I am the purpose of your voyage.”

“You weapon of power?”

Lie for once, lie for always. “I am the Mask Childress. There is no more to know.”

“Great Relic you thing, England people. Your little Heaven emperor bring it, ah?” His smile split into a grin that was both feral and simple. “You Great Relic, Poinsard not got sense.” Choi nodded. “Emperor know all.”

With that he was gone.

Great Relic?
The Brass Christ had left seven Great Relics. She had trouble imagining that Choi meant that in its specific, Christian sense. The thought that the Mask Poinsard would be carrying one of the Great Relics with her across the Atlantic seemed inconceivable.

Those artifacts of history were
lost.
She was a divinity school librarian; this was the meat and bread of her work. That poor boy Hethor had come looking for the Key Perilous, one of the seven. Childress believed that he had probably found it. Or the world would have stopped turning, most likely. That left six others.

To find them now . . . History was suspect at such a distance of time and legend. There were very few sources to draw from. Most of them were retellings of retellings. You could look back through time with the eyes of faith and see the Brass Christ broken on the Roman horofix. The line of His saints and martyrs descended from Him on a river of blood and prayer. You could look back through time with the eyes of reason and see fragments of Aramaic and New Testament Greek and Hebrew and Latin and Coptic, and find yourself clutching nothing but hopes and dreams and the distant memory of a mystery.

That was one reason people believed, she’d always thought. It was to explain. The first causes hung heavy in the sky, tons upon tons of brass scribed there by God as He had wrought the world. The line that stretched from those fateful seven days six thousand years earlier through to today’s racing life of steam and electricks and the politics of Empire, that line was difficult to understand, except through the lens of faith.

Reason failed all too often, building bridges of footnotes and contradictory assumptions. Faith was a highway for the believer.

Still, the seven Great Relics were a story told again and again and again.
Origen was said to have carried them to the Wall when his years were almost done. Bishop Irenaeus of Barcelona claimed that the pagan priestess Hypatia had magicked them into the stones of Alexandria, and so cursed the city to eternal torment. Joseph of Arimathea brought them to England, at Wearyall Hill on the flooded Somerset Levels where the relics slept in Arthur’s seat. There were as many stories as there were tellers who’d thought to bring them to life. Each reflected the author’s needs—and patronage—far more than any truth.

Truth shone through, however. Over and over and over it shone through. That was the purpose of the lens of faith, to assemble the scattered light of reason into God’s intent, and lay sense upon the world.

Now Choi had brought her a tale that would upset all those ancient meanings. All the stories agreed on at least one point: the seven Great Relics had been taken out of time, removed from the lives of men, much as the Brass Christ Himself had been. The workaday world of sin and flaw and compromise would have tarnished and fractured them—the Sangreal would be only a cup, the Key Perilous only a sliver of metal, and so forth.

That the Mask Poinsard could carry one of the seven Great Relics to the Chinese fleet, and hand it to a difficult little man like Choi, beggared reason. The world simply did not
work
that way.

Perhaps Choi had meant to describe some Chinese thing, something of the Rectification of Names described by Leung, which fit his poor English. She far preferred that thought to the alternative.

Even if he’d been drinking wine from the silvered skull of St. John the Divine, that would not have mattered beside the fact that when they reached the port at Tainan, Choi would go ashore and report to someone, somewhere, that she was not Pu-yin-sar. The charade that had thus far preserved her life would be ended.

Childress took to her bed with an aching head and a shaking heart.

They made landfall a few days later. Childress feared they were coming to Tainan, but Leung took her up to the tower to watch
Five Lucky Winds
come into port. “This is Sendai,” he said. “A great port of Manchu-Nihon, and one of the bases of the Beiyang Navy. The Sendai Nihon Regiment is raised here as well. In the mountain wars, those are the most feared of the foreign troops in His Celestial Majesty’s armies.”

She saw a city with gentle folded hills rising beyond, their heights covered with trees. It had a pretty, sleepy provincialism that spoke of purely local troubles and no recent history of invasion. Temples shone with gold roofs and great pillars, but a good portion of the buildings were
low, with long ridgelines and pale walls. Closer to the waterfront the substantial docks were backed by brick warehouses and cargo cranes not much different from what she would have seen in New Haven.

A modest city, backwater of its empire, likely having much in common with her home.

“Will I go ashore here?”

“Too many eyes. Some in the port know you are aboard, or at least that the Mask Poinsard is with me. Far more do not. There would be too much to explain.”

“And Choi?”

“His chain is wrapped around a post in Tainan. He might be able to send a wireless from here, were he to go ashore and find his way among the right people.”

“Can you keep him on the ship?”

Leung paused before answering. “I am supposed to believe that.”

She thought on that some more. “Could you leave him behind, once he went ashore?”

The captain chuckled. “That is not so terrible an answer. But he would definitely find his way to a wireless then.”

“Let him. A letter from a distant port will not carry the urgency that a busy man with much to say conveys. We can fight words far more easily than we can fight a witness.”

Leung slipped his arm around her shoulder. “
We,
Mask Childress?”

She shrugged him away. “You know what I mean. And Choi . . .” She thought once more over how much to say. “Choi is more dangerous than even you know. He has spoken to me, in English, of the business of our voyage.”

“In English.” The captain fell very quiet a moment, preternaturally still. “Do you believe he has had understanding of our conversations?”

“Yes.” She wondered if she’d just pronounced death on the little man with the gap-toothed smile.

Not that he would do any differently to her.

“Go to your cabin. I will send a man to you. Do not be alone, for a moment.”

“A woman—” She broke off, embarrassed.

“Have him stand in the door. He will face away.” Leung turned and grabbed her shoulders. “Do not be alone. Not until I tell you that you are safe.”

“And you?” she demanded. “What can cause such fright in a man who commands
Five Lucky Winds
?”

“I go to see a spiritual pulmonist. There is always a price, and
sometimes it comes from an unexpected direction.” The chill in his voice frightened her.

She had to ask him, now that things were suddenly turning dark. “Choi . . . Choi expected Poinsard to be carrying of the seven Great Relics.”

“He
told
you that?”

That Leung was unsurprised was important for her to know. “The Golden Bridge,” she said. “This is all some magic or plan to cross the Wall. Which will be a terrible thing to have done, indeed.”

“Perhaps. That’s an issue for another time, however. For now you must go below. Stay. Whatever you hear, save it be my voice, do not answer.”

“Are you planning to raise riot?” she asked sarcastically.

“For this, more. Ghosts are always hungry.”

“I do not believe in ghosts.”

“Go,” he said, “and hope your beliefs are sufficient unto the day.”

All the clangor and racket of making port was so much thumping through the hull, once Childress was locked in her cabin. To her surprise the man Leung sent was one of the old cooks. He brought no weapons but for a small kitchen knife. The cook also carried a supply of grain and coins, which he busied himself tossing and studying, while she waited and wondered what dark magic would walk out of Sendai port to touch this boat that had become her home.

HIMS
Notus
ran before the wind with her boilers straining for every ounce of additional speed. Paolina knew that Captain Sayeed was not a cursing man, but if he were, she would have heard some masterful creativity by then.

A Chinese airship pursued them. It was built of a different design—a broader, shallower gasbag, almost a giant kite. The hull below was shallower as well, without the explicitly Naval heritage of
Notus.
The British airship rather resembled a flying boat. The Chinese vessel was a falcon, right down to the hunting eyes painted behind the beaked front of the bag.

So far only the skill of Sayeed and his crew had kept them beyond the range of gunfire. The Chinese had a gradual advantage of speed. Paolina had heard the sailors muttering of stern chases enough to deduce what the obvious eventuality must be.

The eventuality she disliked more revolved around their mutterings of the luck of women and ships.

Still,
Notus
ran.

She wondered why the English wizards had not cast their spells. Were they all as foolish as Clarence Davies?

A Muralha
had become a distant black cliff, a permanent shadow on the southern horizon that receded with each passing day. Africa unfolded below them in an endlessly varied sameness of jungle green and river brown interrupted by burn scars and the occasional flashing gap of a lake. This was not a region of high mountains, though she thought she’d glimpsed some in the distance from time to time before their course had bent westward.

Two days they’d been at this game of pursuit, Sayeed apparently intent on not coming to duel. Paolina realized there was little point in seeking advantageous terrain for battle. Not between airships. Whatever the sky brought them, they shared.

What it brought them now was near cloudlessness. High, icy brush-strokes marred the perfect blue of the vault of the heavens, but otherwise they enjoyed a view to the horizon in all directions.

Captain Sayeed was playing for distance, fleeing north and west toward his friends and farther from his foes. She knew nothing of the battle lines between empires, but the sailors had plenty to say about that matter as well.